Tutor notes
Public Speaking & Presentation Skills Essentials is a beginner-level programme that provides general guidance on the basics of communicating effectively with an audience.
Learn how to communicate effectively with an audience
Feel calm, focused and in control of your body, mind and senses when speaking for an audience
Use your voice and body language to enhance your words
Build a genuine connection with your audience
Deliver a message that your audience won’t forget
As a medium, Virtual Reality is not best suited to didactic teaching methods.
Our intention is that all Bodyswaps modules follow a student-centred constructivist pedagogy. This means creating rich experiences in which learners can explore key concepts and ideas and reach their own conclusions.
This is why our documents speak in terms of learning goals and outcomes, rather than measurable ‘learning objectives’ (a la Bloom’s Taxonomy) per se.
Learner guide
Composure coach
Performance coach
Charisma coach
Content coach
Mentors private office reserved for onboarding and tutoring.
A serene and relaxing space for practising guided meditations.
A hi-tech studio for recording and analysing volume, intonation and pace of vocal delivery.
A private space for 1-2-1 coaching sessions for more authentic and charismatic speaking skills.
A writing room where Faye coaches learners in the secrets of the professional speechwriter.
Practise presenting a project to your peers in a modern classroom.
Give a presentation to clients or colleagues in this corporate-styled meeting room.
Practise speaking to a larger audience in this conference room.
Familiarise learners with the controls and navigation
Tutor room
Ashley and Abeeku, Learner guides
3 minutes
A generic onboarding sequence is provided as standard with virtual coaches Abeeku and Ashley.
The first time learners use Bodyswaps, this onboarding sequence familiarises them with the features of the app, takes them through an avatar selection and embodiment activity and prepares them for the experience to come.
Introduce Essential Public Speaking & Presentation Skills and reflect on confidence
Tutor room
Ashley, Learner guide
This topic introduces the learner to the four categories of skill (Composure, Performance, Charisma and Content) and the virtual coaches who will be guiding them through the experience.
The learner is then asked to complete a short likert-style self-reflection activity to indicate how confident they feel about the key learning points:
These self-reflection questions will be repeated in the debrief at the end to assess how the learner’s confidence levels have changed.
Note: It is important that the learner completes the introduction and debrief if you wish to receive data about how their confidence levels have changed as a consequence of the training.
Learn a strategy for using the five senses to reduce the intensity of a traumatic experience
Leo’s mindfulness studio and conference room
Leo, Composure coach and Ashley, Learner guide
This guided meditation is designed to help learners overcome feelings of anxiety and ‘stage fright’ when speaking in front of others, by turning their attention away from negative thoughts and refocusing on the present moment.
It coaches them through the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique recommended by Trauma Research UK for managing anxious thought patterns, which goes like this:
Learn a strategy for using the five senses to reduce the intensity of a traumatic experience
Leo’s mindfulness studio and conference room
Leo, Composure coach and Ashley, Learner guide
In this observation activity, students learn how to connect with their audience through body language by watching Nola’s non-verbal signals while she makes a speech and indicating when they think she is displaying positive or negative body language.
Examples of positive body language include:
Examples of negative body language include:
Learn how to warm up your voice prior to public speaking
Nola’s recording studio
Nola, Performance coach and Ashley, Learner guide
Practise using vocal exercises to warm up and train your voice for better public speaking performances.
In this activity, Nola leads and the learner follows on a variety of ‘vocalises,’ with the aid of real time feedback from the AI-powered audio visualiser.
Vocalises covered include:
Practise shaping your voice in different ways to engage with your audience
Nola’s recording studio and conference room
Nola, Performance coach and Ashley, Learner guide
In this experimenting and modelling activity, students practise impromptu speaking and explore how varying their volume, intonation and inflection can affect how clearly others understand their message.
This activity is not prescriptive about how learners ‘should’ speak. Rather, it helps them to find their own most effective personal prosody by recording themselves speaking with various different deliveries - using the real-time audio visualiser as a guide.
They then ‘bodyswap’ to watch their performances back from the audience’s perspective in order to determine which volume and intonation has the impact they most prefer.
For each experiment, learners are given a topic to discuss, drawn at random from a bank of questions. These are:
Practise speaking at different rates
Nola’s recording studio and conference room
Nola, Performance coach Ashley, Learner guide
In this experimenting and modelling activity, learners explore how speaking rate affects clarity, diction and coherence of speech.
And they see how three successful speakers (Martin Luther King Junior, Steve Jobs and Tony Robbins) use different rates of speech to connect with their audience in different ways and find out which of these speakers most represents their own natural speaking style.
Discover your natural speaking style
Jeremy’s coaching space
Jeremy, Charisma coach Ashley, Learner guide
Being authentic is about presenting in a way that shows your audience your genuine self. But what if you don’t know who your genuine self is or how to express that in your presentations?
In this diagnostic activity, learners answer three questions (out of a possible six) to determine what kind of speaking style they are naturally drawn to:
This is a self-reflective exercise designed to help learners utilise their natural strengths when planning a speech, instead of trying to pretend to be something they’re not.
Being authentic helps a speaker to connect with their audience and speak with more confidence.
Encourage the learner to think about structuring their speech
Faye’s study
Faye, Content coach Ashley, Learner guide
How you structure the content of your speech can have a big influence on how successfully you engage your audience, hold their attention, get your message across and more.
The best speeches have a beginning, a middle and an end. And there are lots of different ways you can approach this.
In this mini-game, we look at three strategies for structuring the beginning, middle and end of speeches when speaking to:
Learners choose a purpose for their speech and are then challenged to pick the beginning, middle and end strategies that work best for them. Feedback provides illustrations taken from three TED Talks designed to inform, inspire and influence.
Put your public speaking skills to the test by presenting a project or idea to a small audience.
Classroom, Meeting room, Public forum
Ashley, Learner guide
15 minutes
In this simulation, learners choose their environment and then practise speaking in front of an audience of 12 virtual peers. For this, they can upload their own slides (prepared in advance) or choose from three ready-made speeches:
When they’re ready, their speech will be recorded and then they can switch positions with an audience member to see how their performance looked through their eyes.
Analytics provide feedback and guidance on how to improve their speaking in future, with metrics like:
Debrief the learner upon completion of the training and self-reflection.
Tutor room
Ashley, Learner guide
The primary function of the debrief activity is to encourage the learner to reflect and self-report on their confidence levels following completion of the training.
Here, the learner is asked the to complete the same likert-style self-reflection activity they were given in the introduction. Questions relate to how confident they now feel about the key learning points:
Their post-training scores are then compared with their pre-training scores and recommendations made about topics they might want to repeat and new topics from Advanced Public Speaking & Presentation Skills (coming soon).
Assess the effectiveness of the training itself.
Before the learner leaves the module, they are asked to complete a short survey about their experience.
This survey is not compulsory, but the data helps us to assess the effectiveness of our product and identify any areas that need improvement. Clients also find it beneficial when assessing ROI.
The questions are: